Most of the productivity gains have probably come from finance and technology, which would explain why those are some of the most lucrative career options now.
This might be naive of me, but is it equally valid to say that these Canadian employers are only paying such low wages because they have access to cheap migrant labor from poorer countries who are willing to work for less pay than local labor? Without access to their existing low-wage workforce, these employers would have to raise wages until they attracted enough local labor.
The reason of course is that those cashiers can't write javascript. Meaning, not everyone can write javascript, you have to admit it requires at least a bit of training so it isn't an unskilled job.
Edit: And yes, I agree, company owners are very greedy. They wouldn't pay that much money to get people to write Javascript unless they had to. If they could pay minimum wage and still get code written they would. Hence we must conclude that you can't just take anyone and make them write javascript, since if you could companies would already do that. Hence javascript is not unskilled labor as you suggested before. Every job that pays more than minimum wage is thanks to labor shortage in that sector, if there isn't a labor shortage it means that companies doesn't have to compete for labor so there is no reason to pay more than minimum wage.
The flow of money is circular.
If lower-paid people had more disposable income, they would spend more on things that employ other people. Services like restaurants or haircuts or yoga classes or personal trainers or personal shoppers or life coaches, the last three of which are pretty niche right now.
The people providing those services would, in turn, consume other services and products.
I'm sure a lot of new services and products would appear too.
There’s some truth to what you’re saying but IMO it would take a lot more to get there than simply having a higher minimum wage.
But no one is suggesting we push the opposite indefinitely. We're suggesting to push it an amount commensurate with the rise in productivity.
Personal shoppers and life coaches I think kick in a lot higher than you do.
You are quite right. Another counterargument is that a lot of household income goes into zero-sum, unproductive status signaling, a.k.a. "buying a house in a better neighbourhood", and "sending the kids to a better school".
Still, some of the extra income would be spent on things that employ other people.
Has the average productivity grown that much? Sure, I can believe that. Has the productivity at the lower margin grown that much? I seriously doubt that. The value created by stocking shelves at wal-mart just doesn't really change over time. There's a lot of labor on the lower end that is a solved problem with all the productivity wrung out of it decades ago.
Unskilled laborers are just not able to capture that value from Wal-Mart because there is an abundance of unskilled labor and the average person (the laborer) has to derive income from work. They can't just say, "Puh, this isn't worth it any more!"
In addition, there's been a ton of improvements in productivity for warehouse workers. They are absolutely doing more work in the same amount of time.
The same is true at most big businesses.
That being said - at $26 an hour, there would be A LOT more pressure to eliminate more jobs.
This was true throughout the 2010s, but under full employment even a low-wage/"unskilled" worker can realistically go get a different job if they don't like the one they have. There's probably an Amazon warehouse nearby that would hire them at a higher wage, or a restaurant if they're willing to do a different kind of work.
That's the problem. The minimum wage is a legal instrument, not just an economic process. It is designed for the lower margin to be "overpaid" over what they could get from the market otherwise.
It basically says "everyone working should get at least this much of our collective production". This is what we have decided our society should work like.
Our collective productivity increased much faster than minimal wage, making the minimal wage worker much poorer by comparison.
The fact that the stores themselves are physically able in practice to enjoy this increase in productivity without increasing pay to the people stocking shelves says very little about how the productivity of stocking shelves has changed.
The idea that an individual workers productivity is derived from the total productivity of the business isn’t entirely accurate. In the case of stocking shelves, the value is mostly aesthetics and executing a marketing strategy. The value of stocking shelves is based on the value that stocked shelves provide, which doesn’t increase linearly with the productivity of a store.